−40 °C

Ochre Space presents −40 °C, an exhibition by A Yin, a Chinese visual artist of Mongolian ethnicity who has devoted more than three decades to documenting Mongolian nomadic culture and the grasslands of Inner Mongolia.

The title refers not simply to an extreme temperature, but to a threshold at which the landscape, the body and the act of seeing are fundamentally transformed. At −40 °C, the steppe ceases to be a distant or decorative panorama. The cold determines every form and movement, reducing life to its most essential conditions.

A Yin does not present the Mongolian horse as a conventional cultural emblem. His photographs place the animals in a constant tension between appearance and disappearance. Seen from afar, the herds emerge as minimal dark traces across the vast whiteness of the landscape. At close range, they become intensely physical presences, their bodies marked by frost, snow and wind.

Working in black and white, A Yin reduces the image to its essential relationships: light and darkness, fullness and emptiness, stillness and movement. Snow becomes an unstable surface upon which the horses appear as living inscriptions. The apparent emptiness of the landscape is never truly empty, but charged with movement, resistance and the material presence of the cold.

Born in 1970 into a modest herding family on the semi-arid steppes of Mongolia, A Yin is a self-taught independent photographer. His is not the gaze of an outside observer, but that of someone who belongs to the world he photographs. The Mongolian horse is inseparable from the history of nomadic civilisation, having shaped its movement, labour, survival and relationship with the territory.

At a time when traditional ways of life are increasingly affected by social, economic and environmental change, these photographs also carry an important dimension of memory. Without resorting to nostalgia or folklore, A Yin records a culture that remains inscribed in the landscape and in the bodies of the animals, even as the conditions that sustained it become more fragile.

Curated by João Miguel Barros, −40 °C is an exhibition about horses, but also about what remains when almost everything is reduced to the essential: resistance, silence, movement and survival.